After years of debilitating injuries, a will of steel has seen pole vaulter Eliza McCartney claw her way back into contention for the Paris Olympics. She talks to Joanna Wane about what it’s cost her.
Five seconds. That’s all it takes from Eliza McCartney’s first step on to the runway, her vaulting pole shouldered like an Amazon running into battle, until her back hits the mat. Time seems to dissolve in those final moments when she’s falling, falling, falling … her eyes on the bar. The margin for error is dauntingly slim. But, when all the pieces come together in a glorious mix of athleticism and courage, it really can feel like flying.
“Pole vault does have an inherent thrill factor,” says McCartney, over an oat-milk coffee at Daily Bread, near her home on Auckland’s North Shore. “Sometimes when you get the timing just right and you’re in the right position when the pole bends, it shoots you up and over the bar. And when you’re facing bigger heights than you’ve had before and jumping PBs [personal bests], it’s certainly very thrilling.”
One of those perfect moments happened in 2016, when she came almost out of nowhere to take the bronze medal at the Rio Olympics, at the age of 19 — her nails painted black and white in team colours and a slender silver chain with a pendant in the shape of New Zealand around her neck.
“Is there anyone on the planet who isn’t totally in love with her?” someone posted on a YouTube clip of that crucial clearance, which equalled her national record. Look closely and you can see she’s already smiling mid-air, with a pure sense of joy in competing that reminds me of how our world champion Black Ferns play.
Another came two years later, when McCartney vaulted 4.94m at an event in Germany, a jump that still places her fifth on the world’s best of all time. Only three women have ever broken the 5m barrier. Is that still one of her goals? “Absolutely,” she replies, without hesitation. Yet just two years ago, in an excruciating attempt to qualify for the Tokyo Olympics, she could barely clear the 4m mark.
It wasn’t public knowledge at the time but McCartney, who’s now 26, was already carrying an Achilles tendon injury in Rio. Issues with her hamstring were beginning to stir then too. By 2021, sheer pigheadedness was still driving her to event after event, trying and failing to make the team for Tokyo. The weight of public expectation was enormous, the hive mind of an entire nation willing her over every jump. Yet the pressure she felt was largely internal.
“It was very clear, six months out, that it was not a good idea but I kept going. I don’t know if you could call that the right decision, but to me at the time, it would have felt like giving up to leave it that way when I should have still had so much ahead of me,” she says.
“The older I get, it seems crazy to think I was 19 when I went to the Olympics. And at the time, you’ve got this whole idea of what the next 10 years are going to be like and everything’s within reach. So I think the most shocking thing was that I couldn’t have imagined it turning out the way it did. I hadn’t been to a world champs, I hadn’t broken a world record. I didn’t even win a gold medal. So it was kind of an identity crisis to have that taken away from me by something out of my control.”
In person, McCartney is exactly how you might hope she would be. Warm and friendly; open yet professional, with a clear sense of her personal boundaries. Wearing a shoestring-strap summer dress and long feather earrings made from recycled bike tyres, her waist-length hair still wet from the shower, she still looks like a fresh-faced university student. In fact, that’s just what she is. After eight years of part-time study, she’s on the final leg of a degree in environmental science. Originally, her plan had been to become a doctor.
First with her parents and now in a place of her own, McCartney has lived on the Devonport peninsula her entire life. She remembers being blindsided by how many people had watched her compete in Rio, where she became (and remains) only the fourth New Zealander to medal at the Olympics in a field event.
Overnight, her Instagram following exploded.“It was just crazy for a while,” she says. “I couldn’t go anywhere without being recognised, which I just couldn’t believe. It was the strangest thing. Maybe they’ve just become a bit calmer about it but I can certainly go places now. People have no idea who I am.”
The response to her hitting the comeback trail this year, pulling out a win in only her second event, suggests that’s anything but true. “Eliza McCartney Lights up Wellington” ran a newspaper headline in March, after she’d banked her first national pole vault title in six years with a 4.61m jump at the track and field championships, still well short of the giddy heights she’d once reached.
Recapturing the joy she once felt in the sport is something she’s been working on, alongside her physical rehabilitation and “very rusty” technique. Her punishing schedule in the buildup to the Tokyo Olympics meant her injuries never really had a chance to recover. At times her foot was so swollen she couldn’t walk. “I was getting inflammation in weird places,” she says. “My body was freaking out a bit, I think. And then, more importantly than that, it was mentally just becoming too difficult.
“I remember, I think it was the last competition we had in June to qualify, I managed to get over a height. God knows how, because I was in a lot of pain. And then it went up to 4.5 or something. And I remember just thinking, ‘What if I clear this? And then what if I clear the next one? I’d have to go to Tokyo like this. And this is no way to be trying to compete.’
“Up until that point, there was a blind determination that I had to do everything to try and get there. It was a really awful time, those six months — one of those life experiences where you learn a bit about yourself. At times it felt like I was verging on depression. I’d come home after a training session where I couldn’t do anything and just cry.”
By the time the Sir Graeme Douglas International track and field event gets underway in Auckland on March 16 — the final event for the New Zealand “summer” season — the weather has deteriorated to a cold, wet evening at Trust Arena’s outdoor stadium.
Despite the glum conditions, shot putter Jacko Gill pulls a personal-best throw out of nowhere and 100m sprinter Zoe Hobbs breaks her own national record. Particularly thrilling, for me, is finding myself standing behind Dame Valerie Adams in the queue for hot chips. Later in the night, she’s officially made a life member of Athletics NZ.
Hunkered down under a covered section of the main stand, I start chatting to a bearded fellow sitting nearby as the pole vault competition kicks off at the right-hand end of the stadium. A nasty side wind is throwing the jumpers off their stride and only two successful clearances have been made so far, although McCartney, who got a huge cheer from the crowd when the line-up was announced, has yet to make an attempt.
“I’m only here for Eliza,” he tells me. “You’re a fan of hers, are you?” I ask. “I’m her grandad!” he replies. His name is Alan and his daughter, Donna, is Eliza’s mum. He and his wife live in Auckland now but when the extended McCartney whānau — her parents and two younger brothers, her boyfriend, a couple of aunties and a cousin — flew over to watch her compete at the Rio Olympics, the couple travelled up from Christchurch to house sit and look after the family’s pets. When they watched the final on telly, Alan was so excited he took a photo of her off the screen.
Tonight, Donna is at the track as an official. So is McCartney’s father, William. There are two main pathways into pole vaulting: gymnastics (the route taken by New Zealand’s other leading women’s pole vaulters, Olivia McTaggart and Imogen Ayris) and athletics. Donna, a GP, competed in gymnastics. William, who’s a lawyer, was a high jumper.
McCartney’s first love was actually netball. At Takapuna Grammar, she played on the same team as Lorde. Not that they hung out together. “I don’t think I could ever have been classed as being in a cool group.” Realistically, the Silver Ferns were out of reach, too. Good enough to make a North Harbour rep team, she was too short at 1.79m (a shade under 6ft) to be a top-class defender.
A year after taking up pole vaulting at the age of 14, she won the national youth title and the New Zealand secondary school championship. She still has the same coach, Jeremy McColl, who trains the national high-performance squad. Temperamentally, the pressure-cooker environment of competing in a solo sport seems to suit her.
“I think my competitiveness makes me a good individual athlete because I’m in control of everything,” she’d told me. “I loved the team sports that I played, but yeah, I think control is a big part.”
Back at the Trusts stadium, it’s a scrappy performance. McCartney has applied so much anti-slip that the pole sticks to her hands, at one stage leaving her swinging on it perilously before a remarkably graceful dismount on to the track.
A single successful clearance, at 4.46m, is enough to get her the win, from a field of nine that includes an Australian and a Canadian. Then, last Saturday, the breakthrough she’s been hoping for — soaring to a new season’s best at a meet in Brisbane. In an all-Kiwi finish that shows the depth of talent here, McTaggart and Ayris make the podium alongside her.
“Might not be pretty,” McCartney posts on Instagram with a video clip of her jump, “but finally got the 4.71 to automatically qualify me for World Champs [hosted by Hungary in late August]. Another step closer.”
To get an idea of exactly how many baby steps it’s taken her to get this far, scroll back through the feed to last September when she wrote this: “Dear diary, today I pole vaulted for the first time in 461 days. I nailed it.”
There’s a term in sport called “energy leakage”, where inefficient movement patterns create negative forces. Not only does that compromise performance, it also makes an athlete more prone to stress injuries. For McCartney, those ingrained habits had been bedding in since she was 14.
The first time biomechanics expert Matt Dallow met with her, they spent three hours just talking. How much did she want this? And what was she willing to do to achieve it? To reset effectively after such a prolonged struggle with injury, the process would require patience, belief and commitment.
There’d be psychological barriers to overcome, including a loss of confidence in her body. It would also require a complete break from vaulting, even in training. That meant the 2022 Commonwealth Games were out of the question, a bitter pill to swallow after her silver medal at the Gold Coast games in 2018.
For nine months, the focus was on athletic restoration, so McCartney would be able to run and jump again freely without pain. That meant re-learning basic movements from scratch. In an agonisingly slow progression, walking became jogging, became running, became bounding. Last August, she finally picked up a pole.
Like all high-performance athletes, says Dallow, McCartney is mentally tough. A truncated eight-step run-up has been gradually extended to 12 steps in competition, but shortened by two metres from her previous routine as they experiment with the balance between speed and control. In Rio, she jumped off a 14-step run.
Their sessions together are intense, punctuated by the “terrible jokes” Dallow drops in to break the tension. It’s complicated to explain but rather than working on her technique, he uses activation exercises based on internal and external cues (the mechanics of straightening a knee, for example, alongside the concept of standing taller).
“Playing between those allows the athlete firstly to understand what’s happening and then feel it. And the feeling is far more important than anything else,” he says. “The biggest motivator for Eliza has been seeing the positive results from the work we do. She just feeds off that. There are battles and there have been trying times in the last year. But there are ups and downs in every campaign.”
The target is to peak for the 2024 Olympics, now just 16 months away. Earlier, McCartney had described her pathway to Paris as a marathon, but also a sprint. How confident is Dallow that she’ll make it? “There’s still a lot to do in that time,” he acknowledges. “But based on what I’ve seen to date, very confident.”
Another key support person McCartney hopes will be alongside her in Paris, as he was in Rio, is Lukas Walton-Keim, her partner for the past eight years. An elite athlete himself, he’s in the running to represent New Zealand in kite foiling, a sport making its Olympic debut. The couple were at Takapuna Grammar together, although Walton-Keim was a year ahead and doesn’t remember McCartney from school. She remembers him.
The pair have a comfortable synergy. She’s taught him the discipline it takes to compete at the highest level; he’s taught her the value of knowing when to ease back. “She never does anything by halves,” he says, with a laugh. Where does she keep her Olympic medal? “Probably under the bed.”
Pole vaulters peak in their late 20s, so McCartney is right in the zone. Her main sponsors, Nike and Hyundai, have stuck with her and last year she was one of nine international athletes (including three current world champions) chosen for World Athletics’ Champions for a Better World programme, campaigning for sustainability within the sport and speaking out about climate change.
There’s an infectious camaraderie within the New Zealand pole vaulting squad, who train together up to five times a week. When McTaggart became the first woman to clear the qualification height for this year’s world champs, McCartney crash-tackled her for a bear hug on the mat.
All going well, she and Walton-Keim will base themselves in Europe for the Northern Hemisphere summer. Her aim isn’t to recapture her previous form but exceed it. Right now, she’s pulling out jumps despite relatively poor execution. That’s a hopeful sign. “Once I tidy up my technique again, which is just going to take some time, I think the heights will automatically be there,” she says.
“I know that I jump well when I’m actually just enjoying myself. Some people use a kind of competitive anger, but that doesn’t work for me. Even the event I did a few weeks ago, where I no-heighted, I was still smiling after every attempt. It’s just my nature. It also helps me, I think, because that enjoyment is what allows me to do my best.”
